Geralyn P. (Sam) Zeller is an American neutrino physicist at Fermilab. At Fermilab, she is a participant in the MiniBooNE experiment,[1] co-spokesperson for the MicroBooNE experiment,[2][3] and deputy head of the Neutrino Division.[4]
. . . Sam Zeller . . .
Zeller grew up in Glenview, Illinois,[5] and took the nickname “Sam” after her grandfather, because of their mutual baldness when she was an infant.[4] She joined the Glenbrook Academy of International Studies at Glenbrook South High School, and preferred humanities to mathematics and the sciences until being inspired by a senior-year physics teacher, John Lewis, who took her class on a field trip to Fermilab.[5][4]
She majored in physics at Northwestern University,[6] and already as an undergraduate began working at Fermilab, helping with the assembly of detectors there.[7] She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Pi Sigma in 1994,[6] and completed her Ph.D. at Northwestern in 2002, with doctoral research on neutrino-nucleon scattering in the NuTeV experiment at Fermilab, directed by Heidi Schellman[6][8][7] and also mentored by Kevin McFarland at the University of Rochester.[8]
She became a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, from 2002 to 2007, while continuing her research at Fermilab;[1][6] she joined the MiniBooNE collaboration in 2004. After two more years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, she became a researcher at Fermilab in 2009.[1]
As well as participating in MiniBooNE, Zeller has worked to develop liquid argon neutrino detectors for the MicroBooNE and ArgoNeuT experiments,[9] and has also been a researcher with the SciBooNE and DUNE neutrino experiments.[8]
. . . Sam Zeller . . .